Microsoft Employees Want Your Ideas for Improving Office
Ever wish you had the ear of the employees who work on Microsoft Office? For all those whose work lives and breathes Office, here's your chance to make yourself heard. Two enterprising Microsoft employees have created MakeOfficeBetter.com, an unofficial outlet for ideas that will improve the world's most popular office suite.
Like the White House project that started up in March, the site is basically a clone of Digg's functionality, even if it isn't using that exact software. By logging in with your OpenID or signing up, you can submit new ideas and vote up favorites.
The Backstory
Normally, this wouldn't be news. If you've got an idea or complaint, why not just go to Get Satisfaction or contact Microsoft support?
But while this site is not an official Microsoft project, it is the project of Microsoft employees who work on the team doing actual development of Office. Specifically, Steve Zaske is Product Planner for Office.
Microsoft Office might be frustrating and backwards for some, and companies like Google and Zoho are certainly trying to entice those who have issues over to their side. But the vast majority of enterprise people still spend much of their time within Microsoft Office. That makes any chance to sway what the developers do with the next release a very big deal indeed.
So How Do We Make Office Better?
The site breaks down into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access and OneNote. As of 11:30 PST, here are the issues with Office overall that have received the most votes:
Apparently, Microsoft really needs to synchronize Outlook Notes and Tasks. With about 30 votes, it's the most popular idea to date. The second issue is that Microsoft needs to improve the HTML support in Outlook, which actually uses Word to render HTML email, if you can believe it.
The last of the top five issues include detaching the Outlook UI from the network thread(s), improving the RSS reader in Outlook, and adding more bulleted formatting options in Word.
While some of these are pretty critical, we know there have got to be more pressing problems with Office than new kinds of bullet styles. If you've got a feature that you've always wanted in the next edition of Microsoft Office, don't waste the chance to make it happen.
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Comments
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Don't forget to vote for any idea related to removing Ribbon or the ability to switch back to the classic GUI. ;-)
Here was me thinking Microsoft paid it's employees rather well to come up with there own damned ideas. I mean it's not like Microsoft give Office away for free!
Get your own ideas!
I wish Word defaulted to draft mode rather than print, and the old File menu rather than the monstrosity of the '10 version. Simple and streamlined.
Btw, check out www.phixxit.com, it's similar to this site: gripe and vote on iPhone/Palm Pre/Kindle.
Now we can really have proven fact that Micro$oft Dev. Team are not so creatives at all, lol.
Guys,
They are the best around. They are giving an opinion from you. After all that development they have done. Office is a nice suite, but to make it more user friendly. More people oriented, that is what they are wishing. Actually they want you to give them your wish list. they might try to put that in the menu of the new upcoming version.
In the end, the users are the profit makers. Better facility, better production.IMHO.
Office is Wonderful, too Wonderful. There should be some intuitive way to hide all those features we never use and that muddle the interface.
Microsoft Access has always been a favorite of mine, but the left column where you see your queries etc... its to "Thick" and as the commeter above said "Muddled" - It slows me down finding stuff - it's cumbersome...
I just want filtered lists that are alphabetized, not grouped with expand, minmize etc.
Need to maintain a flow with the older version. Changing the extension itself to four letters instead of three is not good. DEVIATING AWAY INSTEAD OF MAINTAINING STANDARDS.
@Stefan - You beat me to it :)
with a good idea anyone can make a good application, so what about people who are paid to have ideas?????? if they cant do what they are paid for then microsoft should fire them and employ people with ideas.
What is the value of my Idea? I would suggest a free copy of Office. Let those who are paid to do the job get on with it. Do your jobs or be fired!!!!!!
ok, first off WOW I seriously can't believe how many people suggest that Microsoft should only build software based on the ideas they have in house. How would products ever improve if they didn't have feedback from their user base? This is one more tool to get that feedback, and I for one think it's an amazing idea.
Additionally, the suggestion that they should stick with a three letter file extension is odd. Seriously, the 8.3 format was a DOS throwback that they got rid of with long file names in Windows 95. I mean, I appologize if you're running DOS 6.22 still, but get with the times, ever seen a ".html" file extension? Besides, the new file names are nice, they are a quick way to identify what type of document it is, if it has macros or not, etc.
You know what really irks me about all of this? For so long people complain that Microsoft is slow to respond to user feedeback because it's closed source, etc, et. al. Now, when they open a new venue to get feedback people complain about it? I really don't understand. Make up your bloody minds.
If Microsoft wants my advice they have to pay for. I would consider across the board price reductions of their products as well as gifting licenses as reasonable compensation.
The last time I gave them a suggestion they sent me a TShirt. That was spring 1999. I have not shared any ideas with them since.
Like pdf reader, a doc(or docx) reader should be created. This will give us power to read all the Word documents swiftly and effectively.
I'd give anything for a help items explaining how to create paragraph numbering. I've never figured that out!
This could be a full-time job. I've finally migrated to Office 2007 and it's an enormous step backward ergonomically. Operations that used to be one click or accessible through hotkeys are now buried in menus.
It's very, very awkward to use. It looks like it was dumbed down for novice users.
> Like pdf reader, a doc(or docx) reader should be
> created. This will give us power to read all the Word
> documents swiftly and effectively.
> Posted by: Parth | August 11, 2009 9:14 AM
Parth, this already exists. Go to microsoft.com and search for "word viewer 2007".
This free download lets you view, print and copy Word docs on a system without Word installed.
Similar viewers are also available for other Office docs.
Get rid of that FAT ribbon, ribbon after flippin' ribbon, give us a break, if we want to have something pretty we would of bought an Apple
Put the stuff back that was taken out when that ribbon was implemented
Get rid of 'Microsoft Office' + bla bla + '2007' menu description, we know already...
Make Outlook quicker, most used and damn slow to wake-up.
I'll let M$ mess this up first
Another great place to share opinions about Office is on the Office Facebook Page Wall. Comments and conversations are always welcome and appreciated!
http://www.facebook.com/office
Cheers,
Kate
MSFT Office Outreach Team
MS Excel 2007 should be modified to create a time line/ schedule. We all know we can color code a row and create a beautiful schedule bar. But this becomes a vary anoying task when various projects change its schedule frequently.
I am looking for some method to put data into one cell and it shows the time line. When the data is changed the time line / bar will automatically move. A line indicatign present date is required.
I have seen a few ways this is done, but they seem complicated. If only MS Excel could make it easy on regular users.
Get rid of the ribbon or allow it to be toggled. Most everything else is, why not office! Just concurning with everyone else's opinion on this...but wanted my vote to count too!
MS power point should be more easier
for any body,
what any body will gain if Microsoft improved office using his thoughts,
sure you know Microsoft connect,it's a place where you can add suggestions, note bugs, against Microsoft products
I've added only 4 suggestion against visual studio(these ideas i'm sure it will appear in VS 2010), in spite I have a tons of new ideas for creating new features and improving the current features,
but there's no revenue from doing so, it's betting for any body that have any idea against Microsoft product to create add in and sell it
Microsoft have to reward the idea owner, by buying ideas
so any body that have a new idea feel he's not wasting his time
Thx,
MrInvent
Word should have export option to .pdf format
I'm still using MS-Office 2003 !!
You know why ?
Because of the new menus of MS-Office 2007..
It's not easy to change the way we are used to for 13 years
So,
Please,
You may add a CHECK BOX to let the user choose between the classic menus (like MS-Office 2003) and the new menus of MS-Office 2007 and later..
Thanks
If your idea is accepted, is there any compensation involved?
Thanks!
Excel: should default to include footer showing filename and path(would have saved about 1 manyear of my life when picking up other people's work).
Powerpoint: why's it so difficult to password-protect files?
Thank you for your sharing.!
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